The Guardian has a piece examining the impact of cheap sub-notebooks on Microsoft's OS business. "The price differential has been slight. The Asus Eee PC changes all that. The price differential between the basic Eee PC running GNU/Linux and one running Windows XP is now significant as a proportion of the total cost."

Manufacturers and businesses with vested interests hate the idea, but in a healthy market this is an inevitable consequence. The fact that we see hardware manufacturers being brave enough to move over to Linux proves that the EU and the US state department were right to go after Microsoft - they have allowed the commoditization process to begin in the software market.